Phishers target Xbox 360

While everybody focuses on the extensive outage that hit millions of PlayStation Network customers all over the globe, it looks like the Xbox Live network hasn't escaped security controversy, writes Yahoo News.

Late last week, reports started popping up that a potential phishing scheme had been unleashed on the Xbox 360 version of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2.

The Microsoft issue is not as widespread as Sony's drama - the gaming network is still running - but it is serious enough for the company to issue a service alert to warn all Xbox Live users of the potential security risk.

Mark Gorton and LimeWire pocketed millions by enabling people to obtain songs online without paying for them and could end up paying damages of over $1 billion, reports Cnet.

In a New York federal court this week, the four largest record companies will try to prove it was Gorton's own greed that drove him to continue operating LimeWire, the company behind the popular file-sharing service, though they warned him years ago to stop and fellow peer-to-peer operators advised him to cut a deal.

Gorton continued to defy the top labels even after their trade group, the Recording Industry Association of America, filed a copyright suit against him in 2006 and after the courts had issued unfavourable rulings against operations like his.

Online retailer Amazon has apologised for a fault in its Web hosting service EC2, which knocked out many well-known Web sites, reports BBC News.

The outage caused sites including Foursquare, Reddit and Quora to go offline, some for days.

EC2 - Elastic Compute Cloud - provides processing power and storage to companies that do not have their own data centres. The apology comes after a week of silence on the matter.

Sales of digital books are soaring in the UK, figures from the Publishers' Association show, says the BBC.

The association says in 2010, sales of e-books and audio book downloads in the “general titles” category, which includes novels and consumer titles, shot up from £4 million to £16 million.

Academic and professional books still dominated overall digital sales, which reached £180 million last year.